Your Nervous System Adjusted to Life Abroad Before You Did
On why safety takes longer to register than danger ever did, and what that means for long-term life abroad.
A few years into living in Spain, I went home to California for a visit.
Jetlagged, mindlessly moving through a clothing store, I miscalculated the distance between myself and a woman at a rack. There was an entire aisle I could have taken. Instead, without consciously deciding to, I chose the path that grazed her shoulder — the roce, as I’d come to think of it, the Spanish instinct to take the route in closest proximity to someone even when the wider option is right there.
She whipped her head around to face me and in outrage practically shouted, “Excuuuuuuse meeee!!!”
I mumbled an apology four times at the floor and got out of there as fast as I could.
My nervous system toggle was faulty that day. My body had recalibrated to a country where personal space closes without apology, and it hadn’t checked whether the room it was standing in agreed.
Now, when someone gives me the roce on a Madrid sidewalk, I barely register it. Not because I stopped noticing. Because my nervous system stopped treating it as data worth flagging.
The baseline that moves in life abroad
That's the part nobody tells you before you decide to move abroad long-term — not that your nervous system will stay alert longer than it needs to, though it will. That it can also, eventually, forget what alert used to feel like as the default. The vigilance never fully resolved. But your baseline has moved along with your body.
This isn't just a feeling.
Chronic stress genuinely recalibrates the body's operating baseline over time — researchers call this allostatic load, and it describes the real physiological cost of a system that keeps adjusting to a changing environment rather than returning to some fixed, original setting.1
There's also a more basic mechanism at work: habituation, the well-documented way a response to a repeated stimulus simply decreases the more it's encountered.2 The roce on a sidewalk is a small, almost comic version of exactly this. Something that once registered as a full violation of personal space now barely registers at all.
In the research conversations I’ve been having this year, there’s a pattern that’s universal across the board: the body doesn’t recalibrate to life abroad on the same timeline as the situation.
Someone in my research described it to me as a lag — safety arriving before the nervous system is ready to believe it. The threat ends. The bracing doesn’t, not immediately. For some people that lag after moving abroad is weeks. For others, it takes years. For a few, it never fully closes, and they’ve built a life around the gap instead of waiting for it to disappear.
What gets missed in most conversations about adjusting to life abroad is that this cuts both ways. The same system slow to release an old threat is also, eventually, slow to notice a new kind of safety has arrived. You can be genuinely fine, by any measure, and still carry a body that hasn’t updated its files.
Sometimes it updates in the wrong direction first, and you find out from a stranger in a shop in your hometown.
Why big things get easier and small things don't
Here’s the part I wish someone had told me sooner, because it’s the part that isn’t just about the migratory grief I talk about on this Substack.
You’d think a nervous system worn down by years of adapting would just be depleted across the board. But this research pattern is starting to emerge among long-term expats, immigrants, and globally mobile folks. Different people I spoke to described something almost identical: the capacity to handle a genuine crisis had expanded over years abroad, while the tolerance for small daily irritations had narrowed at the same time.
In practice, that can look like:
Handling an actual emergency — a health scare, a lost passport, a genuine crisis — with more steadiness than you would have had before you left;
Getting disproportionately flustered by a delayed train, a bureaucratic form, or an interruption that, by any objective measure, shouldn’t affect you that much;
Noticing that the gap between those two responses doesn’t track with how “resilient” you’d otherwise describe yourself.
This is still an emerging pattern in the research — not something I’d call settled yet — but it fits with what allostatic load actually describes: a system recalibrating its baseline under sustained demand, not a system running out of resources evenly across the board.
A body that’s been adjusting for years to life abroad doesn’t necessarily get weaker everywhere. It seems to specialize — staying steady where the stakes are real, and spending whatever’s left on the things that shouldn’t cost anything at all.
Your nervous system isn't broken. It's just been trained by real evidence to sort threats differently than it did before you left.
That’s not a flaw to fix. It’s closer to a skill you didn’t know you were building, learned from repetition you wouldn’t have chosen, and honed by your nervous system toggling back and forth between your “there” and “here”.
When the hum stops being an alarm
One woman in this research reframed the whole thing in a way I haven't stopped thinking about.
She described the low-grade hum of life abroad — the background effort of living between worlds — not as strain to manage, but as a frequency. Something only she could hear, but not necessarily an alarm bell. Sometimes, she said, it could be grounding instead of alerting, if she let it.
I don't think that reframe is available on command; it’s earned. You can't just decide the hum is a frequency and have your body agree with you.
But I've noticed it happening in smaller ways than I expected — a shoulder brushing mine on a sidewalk, registering as nothing at all, when it once would have registered as an entire country's worth of difference.
Most of the people I’ve spoken with in this research are, by every visible measure, doing well. Careers, families, systems built and rebuilt more than once. That’s exactly why the lag is so easy to miss — both by the people carrying it and by everyone around them.
The nervous system doesn’t check in with your résumé before deciding what to brace for.
What I wish someone had told me sooner
The low-grade hum is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s lived abroad long-term — because we’re all aware of the effort it takes to navigate life somewhere new. But I wish someone told me that the nervous system baseline will move in both directions. Adjusting from your “there” to “here”, and back again.
The same recalibration that costs you also eventually gives something back — not resolution, but recognition. A body that’s slower to trust safety is not the same as a body that never will.
Some days you’ll still misjudge the distance, apologize four times, and hurry out of a store. Some days a shoulder will brush yours and you won’t even notice until later that you didn’t flinch.
Both are evidence the system is still listening. It’s just slower than you are.
And if this named something you’ve been carrying without a word for it, you don’t have to sort through it alone:
I hold a small number of Expat Orientation Conversations each month — 60‑minute, one‑to‑one, non‑clinical sessions for sense‑making and orientation, not therapy or coaching.
Together we look at how long‑term life abroad may be shaping your inner experience, find language for what has been hard to name, and gently sort what’s contextual from what’s personal before you decide what, if anything, you want to do next.
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.
If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.
If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.
If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.
McEwen, B.S., & Stellar, E. (1993). "Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease." Archives of Internal Medicine, 153(18), 2093–2101. DOI:10.1001/archinte.1993.00410180039004
Rankin, C.H., Abrams, T., Barry, R.J., et al. (2009). "Habituation revisited: An updated and revised description of the behavioral characteristics of habituation." Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 92(2), 135–138. DOI:10.1016/j.nlm.2008.09.012
"A body that hasn't updated its files" is a great line. It made me wonder if that’s what some places do. Our bodies adjust before we understand.